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Callaroga, Shark Media, Kappie Allawi, and I’m Joanny mag with your Daily Comedy News. Sam Morrel caught up with The Columbus Underground. Seemed a little salty. They wrote, if you have an opportunity to snag Samuel for chat about his career, maybe don’t ask him if he’s always been pretty funny. Sam said, it’s like, hey, how little do you give a hoot about this?
I understand it’s a common technique to ask about your origin, but it just seems so lazy to me. Sam also doesn’t seem to understand why he’s tagged as a rising star and said, yeah, I don’t know who’s writing that, but that’s nice. I guess there are very few overnight successes, so people could say, yeah, he’s a rising star for twenty years or something. I mean, I guess it’s better than if somebody’s like, all right, this is it, So I’ll take it. As a comedian, you just hope each year is better than the last.
Right. That means you’re working. But I’m in a good place now. If this was it, I’d be okay with it. Turning to comedy, Sam likes to gauge the energy in a room before he’s introduced.
Sam said, I’ll watch the opener and I’ll say, Okay, this area’s a little drunk. This person might be a problem, but you feel it out. I mean, people surprise you and they’re gonna bathe differently for me than the opener. Sometimes you don’t want to generalize with the crowd too much. You want to go in with a positive attitude when you’re up there.
I’m gonna go in no matter what, trying to give the best show that I can. Sam is now running into an increasing number of show attendees who interrupt a show to do some of his own bits. Sam says, usually it’s the longer ones, the ones that are stories resonate with people more. I have one about the White Knight, or the one about the alligator or the student magician. Those stories are the ones that people seem to scream out like they want you to do them as an encore or something.
And I’m kind of like, no, I don’t remember any of those stories. If I remember them, I probably wouldn’t be writing new stuff. So those are kind of gone. They live online. I mean, look, that’s more of a music thing, you see Billy Joel because you want to hear a piano man or we didn’t start the fire or whatever.
You don’t go see Billy Joel because you want to hear we didn’t start the fire. What kind of Billy Joel fan are you? We didn’t shert the fire is terrible. Sam said, comedian’s supposed to have a new act, and it makes me really jealous of musicians who wrote a killer album and are just like, yeah, I’m gonna play this forever, although it’s got to be kind of boring too, right. Eliza Selessinger, who talked to the Las Vegas Sun, she is planning a travel show filmed in New Zealand.
Eliza said, I’m always working on stuff and I generally don’t like to talk about it to the ink is dride on the contract. But I’ve been wanting to do a travel show for a while. It’s a weird hole in the market. So many men get to do it to explore and travel and say whatever they want, and there aren’t as many women doing it. I’m already traveling.
My husband is a brilliant chef and writer, and we were asked to do it. I think we made something special interesting. Nikki Glaser spoke to Casey dot com and she talked about channel surfing and seeing herself. She says, it happens a lot. I just recently turned on the TV and saw me in an ad for the one hundred thousand dollars Pyramid.
I was also in the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle back in May, which was a huge deal because I play that every day. So stumbling across my own name was probably the biggest achievement in my life. And I say that with no sense of irony. That’s going down in history, whereas most of the stuff I do, people will remember. What was the clue?
Slash TV host Nicky she said it was very obviously me and I got so many messages. That’s how you find out who your smartest friends are. But yeah, I’m on TV a lot. I just read a quote from Joan Rivers who said I never turned down anything. You say yes to everything because you never know.
WPR, it was interviewing Gary Goldman about his new book, and they were fascinated by Gary’s enemy from Jewish summer camp, a boy referred to as Kampler. Gary said, yes, he was my enemy because he was no more athletic than me, or really charming or interesting than me. He was just a regular kid, but he had enormous confidence. And he made the softball team, and he started the camp play, and he won the sand castle building contest. I couldn’t understand why this kid, who really didn’t have much more going on for him than I did, was so confident.
And I was so shy and sad and felt anxious all the time, and so I felt, even though he had no idea, I was resenting him. I had built up so much resentment because I was losing all these things of this kid who I couldn’t figure out why he felt so good about himself, and I felt so lousy about myself. Gary continued, I didn’t go on the zip line because I was afraid. Kepler, of course, was the first to go on. He was so energetic, was not afraid.
He believed in himself. He went on there and zipped down and came down and returned a hero. And everybody was impressed by it. And they surrounded him and they said, what was it like? Did you have a good time?
And I’ll never forget what he said. He said, well, you learned so much about yourself. He was nine or ten. I remember thinking, whoa he copied that? Here?
That on a commercial for Outward Bound or from an astronaut or something. I said to him, capler, why do you have to be so preachy? You sound like a commercial? And he wasn’t phased by being called out by that. Eating care people looked at me like I was an ogre and a jerk.
Jay Leno was asked and how he would have approached the Trump years if he was still on Late Night. Jay said, say what you like about the Kennedys. At least they slept with real movie stars like Angie Dickinson and Marilyn Monroe. It wasn’t Stormy Daniels and strippers. Leno does watch some of the current monologues and says they’re all really good at that, but he often tunes out because of the commercials.
Right, Jay Leno, how do you know when it’s time to quit? And he says, I guess when you have your stroke? I mean I like it. Why would stop? The Boston Globe asked Brian Reagan, if you could travel anywhere right now, where would you go.
Brian Reagan’s answer, Germany. I want to drink beer out of one of those cool looking beer steins, while listening to one of those cool sounding German bands, while listening to people talking their cool sounding language. As for his travel preferences, Brian Reagan says, I like any place that has a pool with a swim up bar. There’s something relaxing about being able to swim over to your bar stool to grab a cool drink. Being home is a vacation.
I love traveling, but there’s nothing like not being in an airport. I prefer to relax on vacation. But I do like history too, so I enjoy seeing things like Mayan ruins in the coliseum. People should like to kill each other a lot in the past. Best travel Tippy said, sit in the middle seat on a long flight.
It’s a great way to get to know people. Pitchfork did that series with John Mulaney about what music he would listen to at what age. Well, John MLINI turned forty and was listening to Remember Where You Are. Malani says, that was the show we played as the show opener on the Baby Jade tour. My friend Kevin, who introduced me to Steely Dan, told me about Jesse whare Baby Jay to Me is not a dark show.
I was really happy when I was talking about those things on stage. I’m not saying I’m proud of everything, but the person standing on stage has a new life that’s really happy. That was the vibe of the music. Celebratory but interesting. Vulture is twenty five comedians you should know.
Brian bah He fantastic. I saw Brian up in Montreal. Brian said, starting out, I felt like there was pressure for every joke to be full throttle, NonStop punchlines the moment you get on stage. I started comedy in New York and go to some open mics where you got like ninety seconds because they’d be seventy people trying to get up there. I saw the people who did well those open mics were doing these set up punchline jokes.
I’d try to replicate that. Once I was able to move past those situations and I was doing eight to ten minute sets or a half hour, was less concerned about getting NonStop laughs and more concerned about what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. I’ve been enjoying jokes that were slow build. My favorite comedians were never the ones who had the most last per minute. They’re the ones who made me see the world through their lens for a bit.
So that’s how I tried to approach joke writing. Now awesome approach. In my opinion, worst show ever, Brian said, I want to go on record that I like it doing bad shows. I think it’s funny to do stand up in a really bad environment. Whether it’s because the stage isn’t really a stage, it’s a toilet where there’s no audience, or there is an audience but they’re toxic, that’s objectively funny.
Like if you zoom out to this third person perspective and you see that situation for what it is, which is a person trying to pursue this creative endeavor and they’re failing at it for some weird reason out of their control. That’s funny. There was one time, post nine to eleven, post COVID vaccine, pre monkey pox, where I did this show in Connecticut. It was a show with an all queer lineup. I took a train of Connecticut with two other people.
Then we got picked up and driven us some bar in a quaint looking beach town. The sun was still out. It was a backed room. The crowd Feld’s retirement community. I started a joke where I referenced Michael Barbaro, the host of The Daily podcast, and the room was silent for the entire joke.
I followed up with some questions, do you know who Michael Barbaro is? Now? Do you listen to the Daily? They’d heard of it? Do they own guns?
Some of them? And I was like, great, I have eighteen more minutes of jokes to go. And I proceeded to bomb best comedy device, Worst comedy advice Best For one of my creative writing teachers in college, she said, whatever field you’re pursuing, you need to consume that art. It sounds obvious. I’ve applied that logic comedy.
When I’m at a show, I try to watch as many of the comedians as I can. Same for movies, TV, any kind of media. Worst comedy Advice. Every once in a while someone will tell me I should do more jokes about being Native American. It’s always a white person who says that.
I usually mentioned that I’m Indigenous pretty early in my sets. I have a quick joke where I say, my traditional Native American name is Chipotle bathroom code, but the tea is that All my jokes are from an indigenous perspective. My joke’s about dating my parents, getting public lives from a greyhound bus. All those jokes are about being Native American. Mittel has released the ted Lasso Barbie collection.
You can get a barbie version of Coach Lasso with a signature blue tracksuit and aviator glasses, or you can play as Rebecca Welton, the owner or influencer Keeley Jones fifty dollars each. Yikes. Wanda Sykes will start her Please and Thank You Comedy tour in twenty twenty four to twenty nine dates beginning March first in New Hampshire, going through June five, fifteenth in Kansas City. Short Old watched John Klees’s new show Dinosaur Hour that Arizon GB News. They gave it two and a half stars out of five.
Trotle wrote GB News, Lord Clees with the promise of no editorial interference and Dinosaur Hour the show he could make with all that creative freedom, Well it’s just okay. Episode one was a platform for one of John Clees’s perennial bugbears, his long running campaign against the British press. Trotle wrights Dinosaur Hours certainly does not claim to be comedic, which is a good job given Clees’s opening line as to promise the show won’t focus on trivia like quote the latest transperson’s bicycle accident. John Klees now eighty four years old, hosting Dinosaur Hour. That is your comedy news for today.
Follow the show for free on pocket casts, Overcast, Spotify, and if you hate back episodes, Apple Podcasts. And I’m saying that because they made a tweak and if you log in now, they’re probably only serving you the most recent episode. And I want to point out on Sunday there were two episodes, and on Monday there were two episodes, So hopefully you’ve listened to them all. See you back here tomorrow.